ABSTRACT
The opening shot is masked in black, the image – of a spiral staircase – confined to the middle third of the screen. Down the steep stairs, in their brief dancing costumes, run chorus girls (cut to high angle, full screen) out on to a theatrical stage. With these two assured shots, and a perfectly fluid sequence of seductive dancers and their audience of mainly elderly leering men, both The Pleasure Garden and the career of Alfred Hitchcock as a film director began. The year was 1925. The Pleasure Garden was a British film, produced by Michael Balcon at Gainsborough Pictures, but it had American stars, Virginia Valli and Carmelita Geraghty, and was shot by an Italian, Baron Giovanni Ventimiglia, with an otherwise British crew in the Emelka studios in Berlin and on location in Italy and Germany, those countries standing in for the Orient and England.
